Background
Houston Stewart Chamberlain was born at Southsea, near Portsmouth, England, on September 9, 1855. His maternal grandfather was the explorer Basil Hall, and his father was Admiral William Charles Chamberlain.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain was born at Southsea, near Portsmouth, England, on September 9, 1855. His maternal grandfather was the explorer Basil Hall, and his father was Admiral William Charles Chamberlain.
He was educated at the Lycée Imperial in Versailles and at Cheltenham College. From the age of fifteen he lived in Germany or Austria except for four years at the University of Geneva (1880 - 1884).
Chamberlain became an admirer of Richard Wagner, publishing his first work, Notes sur Lohengrin (“Notes on Lohengrin”), in 1892. An analysis of Wagner’s drama (1892) and a biography (1895) followed. In these publications, Chamberlain emphasized the heroic Teutonic aspects in the composer’s works. In 1899 he published Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, 2 vol. , 1911), a broad but biased analysis of European culture, in which he claimed that the Western Aryan peoples have been responsible for the greatness and creativity of Europe, and that the Jewish influence has been primarily negative. Chamberlain’s theories owed much to the writings of Joseph Arthur, comte de Gobineau, who was the first to claim to prove the superiority of the “Nordic” race.
Chamberlain’s later works included studies of Kant (1905) and Goethe (1912), various essays defending Germany’s military efforts and aims during World War I, the autobiographical Lebenswege meines Denkens (1919; “Paths of My Thought”), and Rasse und Persönlichkeit (1925; “Race and Personality”). In 1907 he settled in Bayreuth and married Wagner’s only daughter Eva, his second wife. Remaining in Germany during World War I, Chamberlain received the German Military Cross in 1915 and became naturalized the next year.
Quotations:
"Without the participation of these vital functions it is quite simply impossible for water to rise to heights of 150 feet, 200 feet and beyond, and all the efforts that one makes to hide the difficulties of the problem by relying on confused notions drawn from physics are little more reasonable than the search for the philosopher's stone. "
"Like a wheel that spins faster and faster, the increasing rush of life drives us continually further apart from each other, continually further from the 'firm ground of nature'; soon it must fling us out into empty nothingness. "
"If we do not soon pay attention to Schiller's thought regarding the transformation from the state of Need into the Aesthetic State, then our condition will degenerate into a boundless chaos of empty talk and arms foundries. If we do not soon heed Wagner's warning-that mankind must awaken to a consciousness of its "pristine holy worth"-then the Babylonian tower of senseless doctrines will collapse on us and suffocate the moral core of our being forever. "
He was a member of the "Bayreuth Circle" of German nationalist intellectuals.
Chamberlain met his first wife, the Prussian Anna Horst, whom he would divorce in 1905 after 28 years of marriage. In 1908 he married Eva von Bülow-Wagner.
